Hacked Thai College Website Abused to Redirect Google Searchers to Illegal Online Casino
Brief
A compromised Thai college website was quietly turned into a springboard for an illegal online casino, according to new findings from anti-fraud platform ADEX, which says the campaign achieved full ad cloaking without deploying a single line of cloaking code, mirroring evasion tactics seen in campaigns designed to bypass Google Ads screening .
The scheme, uncovered by ADEX’s traffic-monitoring team, abused the genuine domain km. chpc. ac. th, which sits in Thailand’s . ac. th zone reserved for educational institutions.
Attackers planted a casino-themed page on the hacked site, which Google indexed and ranked first for a targeted search query. Users who clicked the top result were redirected to an online gambling site, a product that is illegal to advertise in Thailand.